


Some of Them Fell Into Heaven

by Mercurie



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels, Community: castielfest, Dystopia, Future Fic, Gen, Religions, Wordcount: 5.000-10.000, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-09
Updated: 2010-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-11 00:37:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/106306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercurie/pseuds/Mercurie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 2014, Castiel has lost his powers, but Lucifer hasn't. Lucifer offers him his wings back - and the truth about what happened to the angels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some of Them Fell Into Heaven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dark_princess17](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=dark_princess17).



> Prompt used: "Your Fall is not the end. Just spread your wings and fly. I promise that you will reach Heaven again." Title is from The Pogues' "A Rainy Night in Soho."

Cas was aware of nothing but his own misery. He was dying, that much seemed clear. He'd been shot. He could feel blood spilling around him, the edge of the pool creeping along the skin of his arm. The pain was an abyss he fell into without resistance, sure that this time, unlike his previous experiences with pain, he wouldn't resurface. Not entirely dismayed at the thought, as long as it didn't last. He allowed the red-tinged darkness to overcome him and waited for the silence at the end.

Instead of silence, he got more gunshots, wind, voices. Feet ran by, not stopping for him or turning aside. A body dropped to the ground beside him with a heavy thud and groaned. He groaned back at it. No one stopped for the other body, either. It had gone wrong; the attack had been expected, he managed to think through a haze of agony. Maybe Dean had known they would be expected. That thought hurt less than he would have guessed, but perhaps it was only because his capacity for hurting was already stretched to the limit.

The gunshots became infrequent and the voices stopped altogether. He watched the stone floor pressed against his face with bleary eyes. He accepted that everyone was dead and that soon he would be too.

He tried once to call out, but his voice guttered like a candle; he was inhabited suddenly by thirst, worse than any pain. It lived in his throat, red and rough, a squatter, a parasite, a pulsating creature that grew until he was sure it was the thirst that was alive and he was merely a vessel for it. He wanted water more than he had ever wanted anything, more than he wanted to live.

Something that might have been a pair of shoes inches into his vision. He tried to ask them for water and could not even hear the dry croak that barely passed his lips.

It took much longer than he'd hoped for darkness to come.

***

The sound of something impacting the earth woke him. He turned his head with only an idle interest. Blades of grass instead of stone loomed huge before his eyes. Between their fuzzy outlines he saw green, a lawn stretching away on a slight uphill slope. Some distance away, a broad back in white bent and straightened. He stared and did not understand.

He was no longer thirsty or in pain. The sun felt warm and clean on his face. He stirred, moved easy muscles, stretching until something stopped his movements – steel around his wrist. It might as well have been a live wire; the shock brought him suddenly alert. He tensed, tried to keep still, but nervous jitters made the chain of the handcuffs rattle. The noise made the white-clad back pause and turn and then Lucifer's gaze found him through Sam Winchester's eyes.

He was still alive and it seemed that Lucifer had saved him. Only an angel could have healed that wound and there were no others left. He was struck by a bizarre mixture of hatred, fear, and humiliating gratitude.

"You're awake," Lucifer said pleasantly. "Good morning."

The cuff not on Cas' arm was attached to a tall, iron fence surrounding the lawn. A lawn, he now saw, studded with cut rectangular stones, some gleaming, some beginning to be overgrown with lichen: a cemetery. Lucifer leaned on a shovel and raised his eyebrows with a lazy smile. He'd been digging a grave.

The handcuffs didn't allow Cas to stand up or move more than a foot. He rested his back against the sun-heated bars of the fence and glared up at his captor.

"What the hell is wrong with you? Couldn't you just let me die, you twisted fuck?"

"Do you remember the first time we met?" Lucifer said, ignoring him and tossing another shovelful of dirt aside. "Not very long ago, even in human terms. Still, I think you've aged. Your... body, anyway. What's that like?"

"Slow. Boring." He made no effort to cloak his sarcasm.

Lucifer looked pleased. "A sense of humor? Maybe humanity has done you some good after all." He stopped to survey the hole he'd dug. It was small but deep, with neat, even sides. The headstone was already in place, though nameless and blank. "Well," he said, "I'm not surprised – but I'm sorry it hasn't been what you hoped."

Cas had hoped for nothing, certainly expected nothing like this – slow death in a cramped, stolen shell, quick death by a bullet, or an inexplicable save by Lucifer. He wanted to rage or snap, lash out somehow now that there was nothing more Lucifer could do to him. They had lost. The others were certainly dead – had to be dead. But he found that he was still afraid and even more, tired beyond tired – tired beyond despair. He said:

"Lucky for me you're here to end that boredom."

"What, you mean this?" Lucifer gestured at the grave. "Don't be childish, Castiel, it's not for you. For one thing, why would I bother with this when I could just scatter your dust? And anyway, you wouldn't fit." He laughed at that as if at a joke, a bright careless laugh that was nothing like Sam's had been.

Lucifer wasn't going to kill him. The visceral fear eased slightly, but instead a tight, expectant dread crept over him. There was something else then. Lucifer still had plans for him. This was not over and, even if he couldn't imagine how at the moment, it was always possible for things to get worse. That was the most enduring lesson he'd learned on Earth.

"That's not my name," Cas said, dry-mouthed. "Anymore."

Lucifer shook his head as if at a recalcitrant child and vanished.

***

Cas was under no illusions that Lucifer had left for good. The waiting made him sweat, hands curled into claws around the bars, senses straining at an opaque world. Hours passed. The sun began to set. He was facing west and the shadows of the stones stretched and reached for him, tentative but inexorable. He considered that it was probably a sign. Soon he grew thirsty again and his throat tormented him. He wrestled with the handcuffs and succeeded only in rubbing his wrist bloody. He fell asleep.

He started back into consciousness with no idea what had woken him. The cemetery was quiet and bright with moonlight. He thought, looking at the man gazing down at the fresh grave, that there must be some instinctive, animal fear, seeded into this body by eons of desperate evolution. A will to live strong enough to sense the danger even in things that appeared outwardly harmless. It was something he had grown to appreciate if not enjoy in the last few years.

"Another one for the angels," Lucifer said and laughed once more.

The ache of dread coiled around him again. He wanted to ask _who? why?_ but he was afraid, not for himself, afraid that he would care when surely they were beyond all that. There couldn't be anything left to care for. He wouldn't believe – it was a trick, a trap. He was too tired.

"You don't seem upset," Lucifer said. He inclined his head at the grave. It was small, child-sized, as were all the others Cas could see.

"I don't know any children." No. That was a relief. This had nothing to do with him.

"Oh, but you do. These children – rotting away in their precious Earth – are the key to the questions that have been eating away at you for years now."

Lucifer ambled over, a bright solid shape in the night, and crouched in front of Cas. He folded his hands like a schoolboy. "If only you weren't too stubborn to ask what it all means."

"Why haven't you killed me?" Cas snapped. "You're not as funny as you think you are."

"Wrong question."

Cas glared. But there _was_ something he had to know.

"Is Dean Winchester dead?"

Lucifer's expression took on a shadow of displeasure. "That's what you want to know? Does it matter? Well, I can see that it does. Yes, he's dead. Are you happy?"

"Why would I be _happy_?"

"Well, he's finally at peace. Snug as a bug in Heaven and not likely to be torn out of it this time. Finally retired, you might say. Resting on his laurels?"

Heaven. "You mean it's still – but there are no... no angels left. Only me."

"And me."

Cas didn't argue. He supposed that Lucifer was no less of an angel than himself at the moment.

"That should keep you busy," Lucifer said.

"Why?"

"Think about it."

***

He didn't think about it. He thought about Dean instead. Dead – really dead. He remembered Dean shouting at him, pushing him with contempt out of his cabin in a drug-sweetened haze. Dean loading guns over and over, a mindless, repetitive, graceful operation. Cas had never learned to do it nearly as smoothly. He wondered if Dean's Heaven had guns in it and had to press his forehead against a knee and bite his lip to keep down the prickling behind his eyes.

He thought of Anna. Perhaps the others had taken her with them, wherever they went. It was possible that she was happier now. He couldn't muster the energy to turn the idea into a real hope.

He thought of Sam, worse than dead, and shied away. He forgot about Chuck, Gabriel, Jimmy Novak, his family. Gradually, his thoughts circled the same impossible fact, coming back again and again to touch on it and then flee. He was the last one left. He, who had always found, always _needed_ someone to follow – every friend he'd possessed had gone. He'd followed them into this solitude at the end of the world.

After a while, he thought only of drink and pills and powders, green and white and pink, a kaleidoscope of colors he'd made his Heaven on Earth. He thought he should be going into some kind of withdrawal, but Lucifer had presumably taken care of that.

Another day passed and a night and his thirst became a torment again. Lucifer came at dawn this time, like his namesake. He found Cas panting, dizzy head resting against the fence.

"Let me help you," Lucifer said. Cas didn't protest as his thirst was taken away with a touch. "You look terrible. I thought you might like some actual water and something to eat," Lucifer added, nothing but genial. He placed a bottle of water and a plastic package of what appeared to be beef jerky within reach. "Not that I blame you. It's hard being the only one left alive. And human."

If Cas hadn't known that even archangels couldn't read minds, he would've lost the little composure he was still clinging to. But no, Lucifer was merely perceptive.

"It's probably redundant to accuse you of pride. Always so cocky, Lucifer. There might still be someone out there who can bruise you."

Lucifer pursed his lips. "Nope. All taken care of. I found the last one yesterday."

It dawned on Cas that they were talking about two different things. "What do you mean?" he asked, wary.

"You've been wallowing all night instead of thinking, haven't you?" Lucifer's disappointment betrayed not a hint of insincerity. Cas thought, fleetingly, that after millennia without friendship or loyalty to any other creature, it was no wonder that Lucifer spoke to his enemies like friends. When everyone was an enemy there was no point in hostility to any particular one.

"I know you're just amusing yourself," Cas said. "Sick bastard that you are. Whatever you've been saving up to torment me with, you're going to have to say it yourself. I won't do it for you."

Lucifer shrugged. Half-turning from his crouch, he reached out a hand in the same gesture Cas had once used to incise symbols into the Winchesters' ribs. That delicate bit of carving had been silent, imperceptible except to the subjects. This was audible, a crunch and scrape like someone stepping on gravel, and it moved like a wave, dwindling away across the cemetery.

In the fresh light of morning, all the headstones now bore names – names in Enochian, and nothing more.

"Enjoy your picnic," Lucifer said.

***

Lirael. Beriel. Umiel. Zariel. Cas read them and read them again. Kaliel. Sabriel. _Raphael._ Some he had known well, some he hadn't, but every name, even if only a name to him, was familiar.

He thought he understood. He had believed they'd simply left, taking all the world's grace with them – including his. It had seemed to be the only answer to the sudden silence in heaven and his own headlong, unwanted tumble into humanity. Of all things, he hadn't expected to have to grieve for _them_.

He drank the water slowly, watching the bubbles dissipate after he opened the bottle. The name emblazoned on the label was Italian. He stared at the graves, tiny human graves, none of them big enough for anyone older than perhaps four years. He tried to imagine Lirael, who had once sung with a voice beautiful enough to distract the lofty archangels from their duties, as a human child, unaware of what he had once been – his grace spilled out somewhere on the profane Earth. He tried to imagine why Lirael might have chosen to fall – tried _not_ to imagine Lucifer finding him, not only helpless but unaware of the ugly irony of it all.

When he finished the water, he broke the bottle against the bars. Fragments glittered in the grass, but he didn't bother to avoid them. He dozed off with shards of glass still gripped in his hands.

A slow half-dream came upon him in which he saw himself rising and running through the headstones, stopping to dig into the hard ground with his weak human hands. He could feel the earth resisting. The stones and soil bruised him and tore at his fingers. It was that pain that woke him. The first thing he saw was Lucifer's brow wrinkled in concern, and for a brief second before true wakefulness, he might have mistaken him for Sam.

"Do you sleep on a bed of nails, too?" Lucifer said. "Self-flagellation is so _Catholic_. Your hands are bleeding."

Cas lunged at him. He was the weaker of them in every way, but surprise worked in his favor; the piece of glass in his hand sliced into Lucifer's neck. Blood welled up from a deep cut and rolled in rivulets down into the hollow of Lucifer's throat – not enough for the jugular, but he might have hit the carotid. He hoped it hurt.

Lucifer looked at him with impassive eyes. The emotion fell from his face like wrinkles snapped out of a sheet, leaving it blank, a mask without an operator. He was truly angry, then. Cas felt a malicious glee at the realization.

"You can't have thought that would have any effect."

"No," Cas said. "I was just pissed off."

The blood no longer flowed and the wound was already gone, the skin now smooth and whole again. A stain remained, a brilliant red banner on the collar of the white suit. There was no other sign that Cas had done anything at all.

"I thought we were beginning to understand each other," Lucifer said.

"We are. What do you want?"

The tension eased and the warmth returned to Lucifer's manner as if no blood had been spilled. It wasn't really his, in any case.

"I want to help you, Castiel. To stop you from falling – like them."

Cas stayed silent, confounded. He tried to think his way around the words. There was something Lucifer knew, something he didn't comprehend yet.

"You've realized – "

" - yes. They fell. So many of them. But I don't understand why."

"The same reason you almost have. They wanted to be human – they envied humanity. An unfortunate weakness our Father built into us because he wanted us to love them."

"I have never envied humanity," Cas said, not knowing himself if it was true or not.

"Yes, you did." Lucifer's eyes rested on his body, distant and clinical. "You've been falling, sliver by sliver, more slowly than they did but with the same ultimate result. It hurts, doesn't it?" He met Cas' eyes. "I want to stop it for you."

"How can you expect me to believe you when you're responsible for _that_?"

"Oh no, Castiel. I'm not responsible for their fall. I helped them. I was the only one who did."

Cas laughed. "No. I don't believe that."

Lucifer leaned in close to him. "Some of them began to despair, you see, when God could no longer be found and his lieutenants fled or began to fight among themselves. They wanted Heaven as it had been. Some of them came to me, but I didn't allow them to join me. If they couldn't stand up to my idiot brothers, I didn't want them on my side. So instead, I gave them some advice, Castiel."

And as he listened, Cas clung to what he knew about Lucifer. That he didn't lie, but he wasn't honest. That he always won the real battles with words. That his temptations seemed reasonable when he offered them.

"I told them that if they truly desired to be human, their grace would ebb away along with their faith. Then they would fall and be reborn on Earth as a human with a human soul. And when, eventually, they died, they would return to Heaven – the Heaven that God had made for his favorite children, a paradise rather than the gilded cage he'd assigned to his firstborn, whom he had made for service and not love. Then they could have the everlasting happiness they'd stewarded for others their entire lives. Only a few followed my advice at first. When I found them on Earth, I killed them and very quickly more were falling every day. I suppose they saw how happy the ones who had come to Heaven as humans were – and envied them. And through that envy they, too, fell."

He shot a smile of triumph at Cas and, though he didn't remember moving, Cas found he'd pressed himself against the cemetery fence as far away as he could manage from Lucifer. His bloodied hands clutched the grass of their own accord, as if the pain could drive away the words – burn the truth out of them.

"So you see, Castiel," Lucifer said. "Despite your harsh opinion of me – and your ignorant prejudice – I've been doing exactly what our former comrades wanted." He gestured at the graves. "I've sent them where they want to go. Each of them tucked away in their own corner of that quiet honeycomb they spent millennia guarding. And Father's engine of bliss hums on without anyone's supervision, eternal and indestructible. There now – do you still think I've done wrong?"

Cas' mouth was dry. "You've changed – everything. And the people, billions of people have died down here. You can't pretend that's benevolence."

"All of them have been sent to paradise, too."

"And the ones that go to Hell?"

"Hell is closed. I don't need it any longer and in spite of what you think, I'm not cruel. Every human who has died since I freed myself has found their place in Heaven."

Cas didn't answer. There was a golden ring in Lucifer's voice – like a trumpet before a citadel – that proclaimed that he'd won and they both knew it. Cas half-believed him. He searched for a gap in that ruthless logic, somewhere a weakness or chink that would let the light shine through. But all he could think, over and over in a painful loop, was that God would never have let this happen. Even His ways could not be that mysterious. He was dead; He _must_ be dead.

He was still numb in the face of shock when Lucifer made him an offer. He didn't think before accepting.

***

Time passed with unbearable leisure and for once, it was not thirst or hunger that harried him. He brooded, eyes fixed unseeing beyond the gleaming tombstones and the sun traveling with clockwork indifference above them. In his previous life he had always been patient, in harmony with the slowness of the world, but now his human body drove him to fidget, to yearn, to _expect_. He was expecting it all to end soon. He discovered that he was looking forward to it.

Lucifer came at dawn again. He didn't crouch down this time, but remained standing, his pillar of a shadow stretching away behind him to become lost among the stones. Cas, restrained by the cuffs, had to crane his neck back to see something besides knees.

"You found it?" he said. He tried not to tremble with anticipation.

"Of course." Lucifer's eyes glittered.

"What if I decide not to do what you want after all?"

"Heaven is sealed against me as tightly as Hell was sealed around me. It would take a very long time for me to break in, but I would find a way eventually, just as I found a way out of Hell. Of course, doing so would destroy it and probably everyone in it. So, Castiel, if you don't keep your end of our bargain, I will lay siege to Heaven until I can pull souls out of it myself. And all of our former friends and comrades will be ripped out of their paradise. That's what happens if you don't do what I want."

He took something out of the inside pocket of his jacket and turned it over in his hands as if he had never seen it, letting Cas watch him touch it with impunity. It was a gun, one Dean had picked up a few years before and eventually come to use more than any other. Cas had watched him clean and load it more times than he cared to count, watched him strap it to a thigh or hip or hide it in the small of his back – watched him care for it as he cared for nothing else after they lost Sam. Cas had almost come to view it with a kind of jealousy. It was a totem, an embodiment of the new Dean, the one that had driven to meet him on the outskirts of Detroit – a different man than the one who'd entered the city. He'd never tried to use or touch it.

"What an odd thing to focus your envy on," Lucifer mused. "It soaked up every drop of your grace like a sponge. It was like you wanted it to be _you_. You can't see any of it, can you?"

He couldn't discern anything unusual about it. It was just another gun. He'd lost so much of his grace that he couldn't even recognize it when he saw it. Still, getting it back was far more than he'd ever hoped.

"Now," Lucifer said. "Remember, just get me one soul. It doesn't matter which one. Just pick someone who annoys you."

"What are you going to do with it?" Cas said, not taking his eyes from the weapon.

"I'm only going to look at it. See how it's put together."

"So you can... make one yourself?"

Lucifer grinned and tossed the gun in the air, caught it again. "Someone's got to be God around here. I think I can do Creation _better_."

Once Cas would have cursed him for that blasphemy, but now he felt not even a twinge of anger. There was only the desire to be whole and himself again. God seemed like a concept from another era, outdated and vaguely ridiculous.

"I can get what you want," he said. "They never bothered to seal Heaven against me after I left. They didn't think I would come back."

He was, he thought, the only creature left in the world that could enter Heaven alive.

Lucifer extended the gun, barrel first, and Cas snatched at it with his free hand. As soon as his skin touched it, light burst from the metal, not golden like the dawn, but a cold blue-white, searing in its brightness. It glowed with him, or he with it, he didn't know. It swallowed him up and all the atoms of his borrowed flesh disintegrated into it, and still he did not die. His thoughts were light and the world was light and Lucifer had never existed; only Castiel existed and he felt his existence with a fullness that he had forgotten. If he had still possessed tears, he would've wept at the memory of how he had lived. Years as an insect, crawling across the earth, barely able to sense or move. So horrified by himself that he had taken anything, any drug, any sensation that could replicate a fraction of the exhilaration of his lost divinity.

He felt his wings unfold. He stretched them and their powerful sweep filled him with a wild joy. He tore away from the earth and flew. Lucifer didn't follow.

He circled the globe, flying faster than thought for the sheer delight of it. The backdraft of his wings kicked up a typhoon in the West Pacific. Lightning struck him in a thunderstorm in Russia and he saw humans run and point from below at the electric outline of his wings. He soared up to where the cold made ice crystals cling to him, turning him almost visible to human eyes, had any been present. The ice melted and dropped away in a tiny shower as he dove back to earth.

He felt the ripple of the Earth's magnetic field as he passed through it. The aurora borealis bent towards him, trailing its delicate green-and-pink folds along his path. He tasted the solar wind sifting through the atmosphere, a strange alien tingle he had been unable to remember when he was human. He could hardly get enough of it now, savoring the sparks as it blew through him. Then he dove down into the sea and icebergs shattered into snow for miles around.

Reveling in nature, he almost missed the pockets of devastation seeded into the land. As he came down across Canada from the north, he began to see the destruction he had experienced firsthand. The cities were razed. The countryside appeared peaceful, but he knew it was a deadly calm. The chaos had gone on so long that even the croats were starting to die off faster than new ones were made.

He crossed the Great Lakes. As he drew closer to the spot he'd left from, his excitement began to wane. He circled for a while, undecided, staying outside what he thought would be the range of Lucifer's senses.

_Castiel._

He had underestimated severely.

Lucifer intercepted him not from below, but from above. Castiel felt his presence, a stooping shadow, and terror made his wings falter. He almost fell. As a human, Lucifer's menace had been abstract, hidden by the weakness of mortal senses. There was nothing abstract about that power now: it bore down on Castiel with a force he could barely comprehend, even though he had faced the actual wrath of an archangel before. Lucifer was magnitudes stronger than him. And he was coming to demand his payment.

Getting his grace back had been worth any price, but now it seemed just as urgent to avoid completing the bargain. He didn't know what Lucifer's true designs were, but he was determined to thwart them as much as possible.

He turned on the wind and shot up in a surprise movement, blowing past Lucifer without giving him time to react.

_Castiel!_

_The world wasn't yours to change,_ Castiel said. _For good or evil – you had no right._

_Anyone has that right. My wish was to make the world better. _ Lucifer pursued, but Castiel had the advantage. As long he could reach Heaven first, he would be safe.

_Mine is to protect it_, he said.

He flew home.

***

Heaven was empty. He searched it without rest, blasted through every corner, every dimensional fold and pocket. He howled the name of God into empty halls and received no reply, not even echoes. There were no angels. No Seraphim, no Cherubim. No ranks or discipline or hymns of worship. Nothing disturbed the stillness except his own wingbeats and he began to realize for the first time how truly immense Heaven was – an infinite citadel with one lone soldier on the ramparts.

He descended into the human regions and found them full, if not crowded. He passed from one narrow paradise to the next, observing the dead with their facsimiles of happiness. There were so many, far more than there had ever been before. The population had grown exponentially. Huge numbers had died in the past five years. He'd seen so many of them perish below; now they were all here, all the ones he'd mourned and the ones he hadn't. He tried to pick out any that seemed familiar – there must be some sign, he believed, something to mark the ones that had once been angels. But none that he saw stood out.

Instead, he found someone else he knew.

When Castiel entered Dean Winchester's Heaven, the clouds were hurrying away after a shower. Dean stood beside him on a small town street and brushed raindrops from his leather jacket.

"Whoa," Dean said. "Hey, Cas. Little bit of warning next time, huh?"

"Dean." In this Heaven Castiel looked just as he had as a human. The shape was already becoming unfamiliar again.

"Sam's on a date. I think she's taller than he is." He laughed. "He's taking her to the fucking local history museum, can you believe that kid? He'll never get laid."

Dean's cheerfulness made him ache. He was not, after all, as good as new; all the emotions he'd acquired when he was human remained with him, painful and somehow precious. "Dean, do you know where you are?"

"Uh, yeah, Cas. Dayton, Wyoming. You lost or something? Angel GPS on the fritz?"

"No, I..."

He didn't say _I came to tell you that you're dead_ or _none of this is real_. Unlike an archangel, he didn't have the power to restore souls that had arrived in Heaven to their bodies. Even if he managed to convince Dean of the truth, he wouldn't be able to change anything. It would only destroy the illusion of paradise.

"What's up?"

"I... I'm glad you're happy."

Dean grinned and gave him a gentle punch in the arm. "They should promote you to Cherub. I could use some magic with the chick I'm about to go meet."

"Cherub wouldn't be a _promotion_, Dean - "

"All right, cranky. But those matchmaking powers would come in handy right now. Might even get _you_ a little action."

"I don't need any action, Dean." It was so easy to slip into comfortable patterns, like in the days when they'd first met. He wanted to play along, he wanted to follow Dean into his misadventures and be made fun of and accepted without awkwardness despite the vast differences between them.

"As long as you don't blame me when you die a virgin, buddy."

The words broke apart the illusion. This Dean didn't remember the last few years – it would have made the bliss that Heaven was supposed to provide impossible. Memories were always selective here. Dean didn't remember that at some point he had begun to despise Castiel for not being the nerdy little angel anymore. Or that Castiel had despised himself for it, too.

"I couldn't blame you for anything."

A ripple of unease disturbed Castiel's mind, distracting him from Dean's reply. Their surroundings didn't change, but he had an urgent sense of needing to be elsewhere. Something was happening outside.

He took a last long look at Dean. "I'll come back," he said.

"Sure, dude. Don't forget to knock first, though." Another smile. Castiel couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Dean smile on Earth.

He left without saying goodbye. It occurred to him as he slipped through the barriers of this particular paradise that Dean hadn't been wearing a gun or, in fact, any other kind of weapon. It was a small comfort.

Back in the upper regions of Heaven, he could feel the edges of the structure shivering. The place had been built by God and was indestructible, but there were weak spots, dimensional sieves for angels and souls to pass through. Each of them was secured by multiple seals designed specifically to keep Lucifer, the only force who had ever dared to attack Heaven itself, from entering. And yet he could feel those seals being tested, and he was unnerved.

He followed the shockwaves of Lucifer's presence around the sealed openings until they ceased, the reconnaissance over. Then he flew to the Spire, the place where Heaven and the mortal world were closest and could mutually perceive each other, if one knew how to look. He peered down as if through a dusty stained-glass window at a distorted Earth. There were souls ascending – so many of them, all coming to this last haven. He knew that Lucifer would live up to his threat. It would already be obvious that Castiel had no intention of removing one of the souls ensconced in its own Heaven and turning it over. It had been his calling to _save_ souls from the Devil since nearly the very beginning of his existence, and he knew that Lucifer would not be gentle with whatever fell into his hands.

And more, he revolted against the idea of helping Lucifer in any way. Lucifer was always destructive, the embodiment of change, rebellion, discontent. Castiel had tasted change – he had become human – and hated it. He wanted to be again what he had been before, to remain true to the nature and the tasks that had been given to him long ago by his Maker. He would resist the new world being shaped from the ashes of the old for as long as he was alive. The fact that the old world was as good as gone was beside the point.

He took some comfort in the knowledge that Heaven was a bastion that wouldn't fall easily. Still, he felt the feather-light brush of despair. Lucifer had all of eternity to find a breach in the walls. And Castiel was only one defender.

It was not the silence but the emptiness that oppressed him, the lack of any presence. For the first time in his long life he _felt_ that there was no God here. Nothing to hold together the pieces. He imagined that he was perched on a fragile fortification, a castle made of air. All the precious souls of humanity were in his hands and the hostile world outside would ravage them if he faltered.

He folded his wings around him and looked down at Lucifer's busy, burning Earth. He felt himself becoming a relic, a statue stationed on aging ramparts, armed with blunt stone instruments in the face of modernity. But he had no means to transform himself or his charge; he would stand and protect until he shattered.


End file.
